The theft-endorsing version of Napster’s gone. The white-collar pigs shut down OiNK, presumably for good. Fuck, it’s a bad time to be a music freeloader.
But all that [supposedly] changes today. Qtrax, a five-year-old startup that claims to have struck deals with three of the big four record labels, will begin offering free and unlimited downloads from its 25 million-song catalog to music fans that have shown themselves unwilling to pay for them.
Sounds great, but this thing’s got more deceptive catches than Larry Centers. The downloaded songs are not yet compatible with Apple’s iPods, they all contain Digital Rights Management software, and you’ll likely be bombarded with a serious amount of advertising. Oh, and there’s one more issue: EMI, Warner Music and Universal are all denying they’ve inked deals with the peer-to-peer network.
Still, while it may not be as revolutionary as the company believes, keep an eye on Qtrax to see whether they can pull off something new. And, shit, we’ll be thrilled if we can just download Phish’s ‘Gin and Juice’, or their great ‘Marijuana’ song.
2 Responses
As expected, this flopped:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/01/28/dlqtrax128.xml
It took a little longer than expected to for the major labels to come around ,but come around they did.If you log on to qtrax now you can legally download for FREE major label music and a ton of independent artists and they are constantly adding music with portability to mp3 players coming very soon,. check it out..Qtrax.com to download the player